Linux Foundation Launches New Organization To Maintain TLA+

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit tech consortium that manages various open source efforts, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language. AWS, Oracle and Microsoft are among the inaugural members. From a report: What is the TLA+ programming language, you ask? It's a formal "spec" language developed by computer scientist and mathematician Leslie Lamport. Best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, Lamport -- now a scientist at Microsoft Research -- created TLA+ to design, model, document and verify software programs -- particularly those of the concurrent and distributed variety. To give a few examples, ElasticSearch, the organization behind the search engine of the same name, used TLA+ to verify the correctness of their distributed systems algorithms. Elsewhere, Thales, the electrical systems manufacturing firm, used TLA+ to model and develop fault-tolerant modules for its industrial control platform. "TLA+ is unique in that it's intended for specifying a system, rather than for implementing software," a Linux Foundation spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. "Based on mathematical concepts, notably set theory and temporal logic, TLA+ allows for the expression of a system's desired correctness properties in a formal and rigorous manner."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.